Quote from: jhkimFair enough.  Though sometimes, it should be sufficient to say "Don't do that thing."  Demanding an active alternative carries the implication that the action was absolutely necessary.

Well, then explicitly say that nothing should have been done at all.

Quote from: jhkimFor example, the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, say.  You can say, "Well, what alternative was there?"  That would be simply, not interning them.  This doesn't need a special alternative -- I think our regular police work and counter-intelligence work would have been fine, since it worked well enough for German-Americans.

Well, German-Americans were interred, too.  As my father describes it, the German butchers in Jersey City disappeared over night.  The people who lived downstairs from him belonged to the American Bund and the whole topic of the American Bund is interesting, especially if you are looking for some good villains for a 1930s pulp game that takes place in the United States.  You can find accounts of Germans and Italians (along with Japanese) sent to camps in Texas.  But I do think it's fair to say the broad internment of Japanese-Americans cannot be justified and simply should not have been done and the American government has since admitted as much.

Quote from: jhkimThe thing to avoid is overblown interpretations like "Well, if you're saying we shouldn't have spent billions funding the mujaheddin, then you must mean that we should have done nothing anywhere else to oppose the Soviets."  Which is stupid.  Suggesting "don't fund the mujaheddin" should be interpreted as the alternative of not funding the mujaheddin but otherwise acting as we did.  You can criticize that in itself that Afghanistan would have been less of a quagmire for the Soviets, but we would have billions more in our budget (which would reduce the national debt, among other things).

In the case of this author's article, he was critical of a specific US policy because of the detrimental effects that he saw it have on their country.  His criticism is that the United States supported General Zia and the mujaheddin.  But General Zia was in control of Pakistan since 1977, when he took control of the country from Benazir Bhutto's father and remain in control until 1988.   In other words, General Zia was a Pakistani, represented a segment of the Pakistani population, and was in charge of Pakistan at the time.  And he wanted massive US aid badly, at one point calling the Carter administration's offer of $325 million in aid over three years "peanuts".  So even if we simply "supported Pakistan", we were supporting General Zia, which is what the author of the article complains about.

And based on Kyle's criteria as he broadly defined it, Pakistan (as a country) was inviting the United States to do exactly what the author of this article is critical of the United States doing (providing aid), unless you want to argue that General Zia was not the legitimate ruler of Pakistan.  But once we go down that road, no dictatorship is legitimate, whether we are talking about Pervez Musharraf or Fidel Castro.

On a side note, I think that there needs to be serious inquiry into this concept of "legitimacy" with regard to power.

Quote from: -E.There's no way to know how influential their experience in Afghanistan was, but I don't think it was trivial... and if it was in some way pivotal, then who knows... maybe finishing things quickly and in a way that left no question as to the outcome of the conflict *was* worth the cost.

This is a bit of an alt.history speculation (which is fun, but I'm critically undereducated to be doing this stuff), but my point is that I don't think there are simple answers to these things or easy ways to "do better" in the future and I'm skeptical of most analysis of the past.

I'm not claiming my speculation as a definite.  However, I think that the burden should be placed differently.  If we do a clearly bad thing as a country -- such as supporting a violent extremist movement or a bloody dictator with billions of dollar -- I feel the burden of proof is to show that it is proven justified by the results, rather than the burden being that critics must prove that it couldn't possibly have had justifiable results.  

We shouldn't just do evil things based on speculation that it might possibly have eventual good results in the end.

Quote from: Tyberious FunkMaybe people have finally come to the conclusion that wars are bad, mkay?

   "War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods.  It is a peculiarly human activity.  To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime. That raises a moral question, the kind of problem with which the present age is disinclined to deal.  Perhaps some future attempt to provide a solution for it may prove to be even more astonishing than the last."
- from the Prefatory Note of The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme and Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning, 1929

Quote from: Bradford C. WalkerOn a side note, I think that there needs to be serious inquiry into this concept of "legitimacy" with regard to power.

I agree.  But the hard part is going to be getting people to agree on a criteria for determining it.  And then you'll also be stuck with the question of what the world should do about leaders who are not deemed legitimate.

Quote from: Kyle AaronThere's nothing like winning a war to make you keen on having another, and nothing like losing one to make you into a pacifist - at least until you turn around a few years later and rationalise your defeat so you can say, "but this time we'll do it right."

I think there is a great deal of truth to that analysis and the problem with that effect is that it detaches the willingness to enter a war or avoid a war from the necessity of fighting a war or, at the very least, warps the moral calculus involved.  The anti-war sentiments generated by the horrors of the First World War (more on that below) made many countries reluctant to enter a war in the Second, but their reluctance didn't prevent the war and may have made it worse.  The effect you are talking about can make a country more willing to enter an unnecessary war but also less willing to enter a necessary war, perhaps until it is too late.

I also think that your point is why we see so little positive news about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an almost palpable hope that those wars will fail in some quarters.  I think there are people who believe, perhaps correctly based on the points that you made, that if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan end well and are seen as "good wars" like WW2 or Korea, that it will only lead to more wars to change regimes that the United States doesn't like.  So I think there are people who hope that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will end badly so that they are not followed by wars in, say, Iran and North Korea in the future.

Quote from: Kyle AaronPeople have always felt that wars they lose are bad. You don't get very many anti-war movies about battles we won.

This particular part is not entirely true because the victor rarely wins every battle and suffers no losses.  There was a great deal of literature after WWI that depicted the war as horrific and bad, even from those on the winning side (see the quote I posted earlier in the thread).  There are times when war takes a high enough toll on both sides that even the winner feels like a loser.  But the use of air power and overwhelming firepower against weaker opponents make it very unlikely that America will experience the equivalent of the Somme or even Vietnam ever again.

And a problem with later wars is that the soldiers who returned home largely remained silent about the horrors they witnessed and the misdeeds that they participated in which has allowed WW2 and Korea to be viewed almost unquestionably as "good wars" even though the Allied militaries did many things that would truly shock the world if coalition troops were to behave the same way in Iraq.

Quote from: jhkimI'm not claiming my speculation as a definite.  However, I think that the burden should be placed differently.  If we do a clearly bad thing as a country -- such as supporting a violent extremist movement or a bloody dictator with billions of dollar -- I feel the burden of proof is to show that it is proven justified by the results, rather than the burden being that critics must prove that it couldn't possibly have had justifiable results.  

We shouldn't just do evil things based on speculation that it might possibly have eventual good results in the end.

I agree, but I suspect we set the bar at different places.

How do you do that justification? What factors do you include? How do you assess the value of the "results?"

The algorithm needs to distinguish between support for Stalin in WWII (which most people would probably support as "good") and support for the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan (which at least some folks would count as "bad")

I don't think this is trivial and I suspect that there are likely to be a variety of partisan factors and other agendas that will muddy the waters.

Maybe it's not critical that we all score actions the same way, though: both of us are going to take the same approach and hold the people in charge accountable for their results.

Nothing -- no results -- could justify Abu Ghraib; I would like to see the people who made those decisions held responsible for them. I'll take everyone's word that bombing Cambodia was a huge mistake. I tend to come down positive on our intervention in Bosnia. I think supporting Stalin in WWII was necessary; I think supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan was probably equally so (and I think the fall of the USSR are the results that justify it)

Etc. All of these positions are subject to change with new information.

We probably agree on some of these and disagree on others; I find that entirely reasonable.

One place I probably differ from others here is that, within boundaries, I probably favor action over inaction and hold people accountable accordingly. I would rather our leaders take some risks in the pursuit of our national agenda and therefore I'm less inclined to cry out for blood when things don't go well (I supported -- and still support -- our decision to invade Iraq; clearly a variety of mistakes were made at various points during the operation. With certain exceptions that I've already mentioned, I still think we're right to be there).

I'm certain that some people here would set a very different bar; I want to be clear that I respect their right to do so (I'm not sure how far off I am from you, John -- reading your analysis of Afghanistan, I think we share a lot of the same perspective even if we reach different conclusions in some cases).

Cheers,
-E.

Quote from: -E.I'm certain that some people here would set a very different bar; I want to be clear that I respect their right to do so (I'm not sure how far off I am from you, John -- reading your analysis of Afghanistan, I think we share a lot of the same perspective even if we reach different conclusions in some cases).

I think that if the Carter administration purposely provoked the Soviets into invading in order to turn Afghanistan into a Vietnam, that was crossing an ethical line of purposely messing up a country to serve an end that wasn't to ultimately help that country.  The distinction I'm making here is that backing a group of insurgents because a countries government is bad and we feel the insurgents represent a better future for the country is far more noble and understandable than backing a group of insurgents to create problems for a third party without any regard for the plight of the country that's being messed with.  Deciding to sacrifice an involuntary victim to serve a greater good is where utilitarian thinking gets particularly dangerous and immoral and I can certainly see the residents of a country resenting another country deciding they were expendable in the service of a greater good that had little to do with them.

Beyond that, I think that much of the problem of backing the mujahadeen is far more clear in retrospect than it was at the time, when the prevailing mindset was that the Soviet Union was stronger than it was and that the Cold War was unlikely to end any time soon.  So I can understand why it was done at the time, even if it caused problems in retrospect.  I think that one of the big lessons of both backing the mujahadeen and bombing Cambodia is that people need to think beyond the current situation and narrow objective and at least consider what happens when it's over.  It's very easy to get so caught up in an immediate problem that one loses sight of where things are headed.  

Looking at Cambodia one sortie at a time may have looked rational but looking at the big picture and how much ordinance was being dropped overall should have clued someone in to how crazy it was getting.  Similarly, backing the mujahadeen to resist the Soviet Union was a reasonable choice in that context of finding a credible force to resist them but thinking about what might happen if the Soviet Union was driven out and the mujahadeen took power might have encouraged the exploration of other options and opportunities of the sort that John Kim is talking about.

Damn.....


Didn't any of you guys go to New Years Eve parties last night?

- Ed C.

Quote from: -E.One place I probably differ from others here is that, within boundaries, I probably favor action over inaction and hold people accountable accordingly. I would rather our leaders take some risks in the pursuit of our national agenda and therefore I'm less inclined to cry out for blood when things don't go well (I supported -- and still support -- our decision to invade Iraq; clearly a variety of mistakes were made at various points during the operation. With certain exceptions that I've already mentioned, I still think we're right to be there).

For me, it depends what type of action.  In the case of war, I think we should favor inaction.  i.e. War should be a last resort rather than a risk to try just in case it might help our agenda.  This is just another side of what I said before: that doing bad things has a burden of proof that it is necessary.  

Quote from: -E.Nothing -- no results -- could justify Abu Ghraib; I would like to see the people who made those decisions held responsible for them. I'll take everyone's word that bombing Cambodia was a huge mistake. I tend to come down positive on our intervention in Bosnia. I think supporting Stalin in WWII was necessary; I think supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan was probably equally so (and I think the fall of the USSR are the results that justify it)

Fair enough.  As I mentioned, I disagree about the mujaheddin, and I think that Stalin is questionable.  He murdered far more of his own countrymen than Hitler did his, and he turned out to be just as much of an empire-builder.  His mass murders weren't racist in motivation, but I'm not sure that makes him the lesser evil.  In retrospect, the Axis would still have been defeated -- but I'll grant that it wasn't at all obvious at the time.  If our sole goal was freeing Western Europe, then our choice was understandable.  However, if we were looking at the wider picture, it is not as clear.

Quote from: KoltarDamn.....


Didn't any of you guys go to New Years Eve parties last night?

- Ed C.

I went out for a very nice and expensive steak dinner, had lots of Jagermeister, watched "From Hell", had great sex around 1 am (yes, with another person) and woke up in a soft bed and without a hangover. Why do you ask?

Quote from: Werekoala....... watched "From Hell", had great sex around 1 am (yes, with another person) and woke up in a soft bed and without a hangover. Why do you ask?      

Its just I left the house around 6:45pm last night, went to a pretty good party hosted by one of my players. (She's in her 60s...but looks early 50s.) Went there with one of my other platers. (the young woman who loves STAR WARS that was mentioned in another thread). Did a little bit of drinking , toasted the NEW YEAR . Slept over at that house ....then I get home around 12noon  and I see  by the time caodes that people were STILL dsoing this  argument when they could have been partying.


 Koala - Its cool, very cool that you had a great time last night...


- Ed C.

IMHO, New Years is quite possibly the most over-rated night of the year.  I have more fun on a typical Friday night than most New Years.

Well, it beat the hell out of most MONDAY nights.

Quote from: John MorrowPerhaps you'd prefer a friendly, more heavily moderated site, like this or this?  

It might also help if you simply add me to your ignore list.

That's awfully helpful of you, if a bit backwards, John.

I get tired of defending myself as an American and labeled as some blind idiot savant patriot for that defence by the vast majority of the posters in these threads.

If you are one of those people... well then I must excuse myself to head back to fucking gradeschool, because I've obviously failed basic reading comprehension.

On the other hand, I see a lot of anti-american posting on this thread waving that article about on the presumption that the rest of us didn't read it for ourselves, because what they seem to get from it is vastly different than what I got from it.

Then again, given the demographics of this site, and the general tone of posting, I feel very much like a black man on a 'south will rise again' forum. Sure, there are some fellow blacks, and not ever poster is pro-slavery, but fuck'n-a if I don't feel my neck stretched just a mite wandering around these parts.  Its not moderation, its the unmitigated, blind prejudice and unthinking insults that are casually tossed off.

All in all, I'd much rather hang out with the girls from Brisbane who were hitting the local slopes this Monday.  None of them seemed at all put out about the role of the US on the world stage, they were much to busy availing themselves of our copious mountains and free market economy.... or something.


Yeah, nothing like being reviled for where you were born to make you appreciate reading a forum...:rolleyes: